Understanding our inner light, and more...

Quirks and Quarks

Dust from car tires can be bad for fish — what might it do to us?

As car tires wear, they shed billions of ultrafine particles of rubber that contain a complex mix of chemicals, including one called 6PPD-Quinone that’s been linked to mass die-offs of migrating salmon. Now researchers are sounding the alarm that this chemical is accumulating in humans, and we have no clear understanding of its toxicity. An international team of scientists, including Rachel Scholes from the University of British Columbia, are calling for more scrutiny of the chemicals that go into car tires, since so much ends up in our environment. Their paper was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

Fecal Transplants seem to have lasting metabolic effects

Transplanting the gut microbiome has been held out as a hope for a range of disorders, from obesity to mental health issues. A study that followed obese adolescents four years after receiving a fecal microbiota transplant from healthy individuals has shown positive impacts on the recipients' weight and metabolic health. Dr. Wayne Cutfield, a pediatrician and professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, said they also found after all this time that the donor bacteria have remained established in the recipients' gut microbiome. The study is in the journal Nature Communications.

An ant queen clones sexual slaves of another species for her daughters

In a truly bizarre tale from the animal world, researchers have discovered a species of ant where the queen gives birth to males of two totally different species. Somewhere along their evolutionary path, these Messor ibericus queen ants in southern Europe developed an ability to clone male Messor structor ants for her daughters to mate with and to produce a hybrid working class. Jonathan Romiguier, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Montpellier in France, said these M. ibericus ants essentially domesticated ants of another species. The study was published in the journal Nature.

Why other apes can’t walk a mile in our shoes

A feature that distinguishes humans from other primates is the ability to walk upright. The major evolutionary change in the structure of our pelvis that allows for our bipedalism has now been traced genetically and developmentally. Human pelvic blades initially form in the embryo like other primates, but then flip their growth from vertical to horizontal, to give the human pelvis its unique basin shape. This new research led by Terence Capellini, Chair of the human evolutionary biology department at Harvard University and postdoctoral student Gayani Senevirathne, was published in the journal Nature.

Women glow. So do men. Understanding our 'inner light'

You might have been told by an admirer that you have a unique glow. In two groundbreaking studies, researchers have demonstrated the reality of that poetic compliment. Using ultra-sensitive instruments capable of detecting individual photons, Canadian researchers have imaged a biological source of incredibly faint light, known as Ultraweak Photon Emissions (UPE), that has potential as a future non-invasive diagnostic imaging tool.

Daniel Oblak, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Calgary, oversaw a study where they unequivocally demonstrated that living things, like mice, give off an extremely faint glow that dims when they die. His study was published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

In a separate study, Nirosha Murugan, — an assistant professor of tissue biophysics at Wilfred Laurier University — discovered that these UPEs can also detect different mental states in the brain. That study was published in the journal iScience.